Water Conservation

Water is a precious natural resource. And as a key ingredient in most of our beverages, it’s essential to the operation of our stores.

A great deal of the water we use in our stores is to make coffee and tea beverages and for “back of the house” operations, such as running dishwashers and ice machines. We’re working to better understand how we use water and how we can use it more responsibly.

Our Goal

We’re committed to reducing our water usage by 15% in company-owned stores by 2012.

What We've Been Doing

We are implementing new alternatives to the dipper well system used to clean utensils that we believe will significantly reduce our water usage across the globe.

We continue to include water-saving technology in our equipment specifications. For example, in our US company-owned stores, our mechanical dishwashers use less than one gallon of water per cycle through high pressure spray arms.

In many markets, we use a blast of higher-pressure water to clean blender jugs instead of an open tap. We’ve also programmed our espresso machines to dispense less water when rinsing espresso shot glasses. And we train our partners (employees) to keep the refrigeration coils on ice machines clean to reduce the amount of latent heat from the machines and minimise ice melt.